


Existence is Flawed

by TriplePirouette



Series: (s)Aints [4]
Category: Operation: Endgame (2010), Ravenous (1999)
Genre: Blood Play, Cannibalism, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-27
Updated: 2012-09-27
Packaged: 2017-11-15 03:55:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/522867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TriplePirouette/pseuds/TriplePirouette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why Ives chose Hierophant. This pre-dates all the events in the first three parts of the series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Existence is Flawed

**Author's Note:**

> These two are taking over my life. I like, seriously don’t get why I’m so attracted to these characters. I’m also constatnly worried they’re very ooc, but then I stop to think about it and I can TOTALLY JUSTIFY EVERY SINGLE MOVE THEY MAKE. So then I just have to shrug and keep writing. Title is a song lyric from Closer by Nine Inch Nails (which, coincidentally, I believe is a love song)
> 
> Part 4 of My Hiero/Ives Series, (s)Aints

Ives had been around for a long fucking time. He’d seen centuries turn and decades pass. He’s followed fashion trends and government shifts and fought in wars. He went to college and familiarized himself with every major innovation in DNA and computer technology in order to keep up with every innovation designed to stop him, earning three masters and two doctorates along the way. He made smart investments early and thrived on barely legal insider trading. He learned to hack computers. How to keep his face off of security cameras. How to dispose of a body discretely when hunting in the city.

He was a smart monster. He wasn’t ready to pay for his crimes on a grand, universal scale or on a small, mortal scale. Every move he had made was done so he could stay out of sight, out of the system, and keep eating.

But being around for a long time, and being careful, meant that he’d spent a lot of time lonely.

He knew what and who he was. He knew that there wasn’t much hope for him to find the kind of love that his mother had always told him about, the kind of ‘normal’ relationship that he used to crave before the TB took over and changed his life. Hookers and slutty barflies and marks could only keep him company for so long. He could only play with his food for a short while before he actually had to eat.

And he couldn’t stand the disgust, the hate, the fear in their eyes when he told them, when he revealed what he actually was. Every dozen or so years there was always one, one pretty girl with a good heart and a kinky taste in sex that he hoped, prayed, wished could understand him. Even if she wouldn’t eat with him, a decade of an understanding lover and friend, or five years even, would have gone so far in holding him down, giving him an anchor, keeping him human.

And sometimes they pretended. But he would see the fear, the revulsion, their refusal to eat any kind of meat in his presence and the drive to lie to stay alive. When he couldn’t take that look in their eyes anymore they would have to go, and their meat was always just a little bitter for the way it ended.

He was always on the look out for another one, another mark, another fuck that just might take his mind off of the every day problems of being a Wendigo in a post-industrial world. His mind would reel with his next kill, if he’d left DNA behind at his last, if he’d been attracting attention, and if anyone has his picture anywhere. It was so much easier back when he first became Wendigo: there were no cameras, no internet, no databases. If people disappeared, it was a wolf or they got lost in the woods. Now, every disappearance was suspect and hard to hide.

He needed something other than the drivel on television and porn on the internet to keep him occupied. Something besides a good beer and a random fuck that may or may not lead to a feeding to fill the hours between hunting the internet and police databases to remove every trace of himself. He needed something that was more stable, more real, than the fantasy of his former life to sate his taste for adventure and desire.

He came across her by accident. He’d been trolling the dating website for years now, using a hole in the code to search through the profiles to find the most desperate, the loneliest, the least likely women and men to be missed. It’s a new kind of stalking for him. It had quickly become boring, until he saw her picture: red lips, bright blonde hair, a dangerously white smile. He couldn’t help himself. The words in the profile were vague, but he could tell they were also carefully crafted to appeal to a certain type of man. Her profile was there one minute, gone the next and he couldn’t help but track it back, all the way through to the government IP that it originated from.

He imagined her an FBI agent, or perhaps DEA, and he couldn’t help but feel that it might be fun to flirt with danger for a bit, make one of the very people who hunted him go missing, eat her alive until she came then eat her dead and sate his other appetite, but more research was in order, and what he found made him smile.

He only found a single file and an old news article, but it was enough.

She was an assassin. There was no document that named her job or said it explicitly anywhere, but she was on the government’s payroll none the less, and flagged for some very lovely… tendencies. The news article was a dozen or so years old, detailing the sudden disappearance of a young, disturbed girl that remained oddly unnamed. The way her file was worded was enough to pique his interest and give him a picture of what it alluded to: to a psychopathic killer who had been pulled into service of the government. A hit-woman for hire. A woman whose only choice was to work for them, or live out the rest of her days behind bars before they sentenced her to the needle or the chair.

No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t find any more. But he had a picture, and that was always enough before.

Tracking her down took him weeks. Long days and nights in front of the computer, going through files and profiles and tracking any little thread he found. It was a rush, a thrill that he’d thought he’d lost. Something about this woman called to him, this woman whose internet profile called her ‘Jenny Smith,’ and it wouldn’t let him go.

When he found her, it was nearly by mistake. He’d tracked down the town of the man in the only dating profile that interacted with hers, started spending long days in coffee shops and tiny stores, hiding under ball caps and behind newspapers as he searched for this man and his mysterious blonde date. Three days in, he tried to hide his glee as he held the door for her as she slipped out of a Starbucks, coffee in one hand and purse in the other. She thanked him with a smile and a bright southern accent, but her eyes barely set on him before she was already carefully hiding the way her eyes darted to the mark she tailed. He almost went up to her the very first day. Almost.

She was gorgeous, petit and curvy with eyes that sparkled with mischief and a bright, white smile that was almost certainly a shark in disguise. Now that he’d seen her, he knew he had to have her. He had to have her in any way she’d let him.

He followed her. Silently. Carefully. At a distance she’d never expect and in ways she’d never fathom.

He watched her kill a man.

Ives couldn’t tear his eyes from her: she straddled him, knife buried in his chest as she choked the life from him, her body bucking with his struggles like some snuff film star, pleasure written across her face as she listened to his last, choking breaths.

He watched with fascination and a shiver as she pulled the knife from his chest and licked the blood off her blade.

He watched her strip naked on the man’s bed, her hands touching herself in her victory, her body writhing and mussing the bedsheets as she found her own pleasure with one hand between her legs and two bloody fingers between her lips. It didn’t take long to bring himself off in his hand in the empty apartment he was using to spy in her. He watched through the obscured windows in fascination as she set about the house naked, dismembering the man and piling his body parts in plastic bags before cleaning with bleach in just a pair of high heels and rubber gloves.

He didn’t know who she really was, he barely knew anything about her, but he knew that he had to have her. Even if she ended up on his plate like all the others, he had to have her.  


End file.
